Thank you for the question.

As I think the committee is aware, in the last few years, CRA has undertaken a significant number of initiatives aimed to reduce the burden of compliance for small businesses in the country. For example, we made a number of changes to the small business account to enable and facilitate online business-related correspondence to allow businesses to submit specific tax questions in writing online and to be able to receive in return an online response, a response they can kind of count on, as it were.

We've expanded the electronic filing services for businesses for filing their returns, electronic authorizations, and updated electronic banking flexibilities. We've put in place new web tools and expanded our online information. We've introduced an agent ID for all call centre agents for telephone service, I think to facilitate a little bit of improved accountability, as it were.

Importantly, we've done a couple of things in terms of remittances that ease the filing burden. We have reduced remittance thresholds which has resulted in a significant reduction in the number of remittance filings that small businesses needed to do, estimated to be somewhere between 800,000 down to about 500,000 remittances as a result of that change.

As you may have noticed in the most recent budget, we will be moving forward to implement a new quarterly remitters' initiative for new small businesses below a kind of small threshold of remittances. Normally, new businesses would need to remit on a monthly basis as a start-up, until they established a track record to enable them to move to quarterly filings. The budget announced we would be moving to allow those new businesses to elect to file on a quarterly basis, and we would obviously then monitor them to make sure they remained compliant. That's estimated by us to affect a population of around 80,000 new small business start-ups.

I think overall it's quite a large range of measures that hopefully have gone a long way to reducing some of the red tape burden for small businesses. Certainly in the consultations we did over the last number of months, over last fall, we received a lot of feedback about the progress that had been made, but equally importantly about the further progress we needed to make, the things we needed to continue to focus on, because we're not done by any stretch of the imagination.

There's a lot more that can be done to improve services and reduce the burden of compliance with the tax code, and our commitment is to seriously take that feedback on board and come forward in the coming months with a concrete action plan for the further things we'll be doing.

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